A good starting point is to go to your faculty website eg. law.anu.edu.au and look up each one of your courses. It should tell you how many contact hours you have each week eg:
lectures: 3 (this could be 1*3 hour lecture, 3*3 hour lectures or 1*2 and 1*1 hour lectures)
tutes: 1
Seminars:1
once you have this info, look at your timetable and figure out which lectures ect. you have to go to. for example, in busn1001 you can go to 'lecture A' and 'lecture B' which are two seperate one hour lectures OR you can go to 'lecture: repeat' which is a 2 hour lecture, as in lecture a followed immediately by lecture b. You can tell you only have to go to either one of these options becausxe the course info for busn1001 will tell you you only have 2 hours worth of lectures (not 4).
Oncee you have figured out exactly which lectures you have to go to, and which are repeats ect. just look at your timetable and figure out which lectures are only on once (eg stat1008 has 3*1 hour lectures that are not repeated, so I have to go to all 3 of those at the only time they are on) then look at what these 'one only' lectures clash with and pick another option (eg the repeat, or another lecture stream) for these lectures... once you have all the lectures figured out try and build your tutes/seminars/workshops around them.... and it should all work from there. There are sometimes clashes which are unresolved. In this case, you need to pick which one you want to miss out on or pick different subjects that don't clash.
I was also told the timetable changes depending on how many students enroll in certain classes. It will keep changing up until week 2 or 3 so you have to constantly keep checking back and making sure everything is ok. If you have 2 classes that clash, and alot of people are enrolled in both those classes, the system will try to move them to a better time...
I hope this was helpful as opposed to just plain confusing... if you are really having issues with your timetable go see your course adviser/lecturer/whoever which should be listed on the facutly website.